Muddled Reflections on My Grandfather's Passing

My grandfather's passing was very strange. He was in the hospital for a month, maybe more, maybe less. We—my mom, my dad, and I—were in the midst of the first COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, an ocean away and separated by a danger that felt tangible only when you let yourself think too hard about it. There was at best one-way contact between my grandfather and us, which was through a small camera neatly propped above the fireplace—a security cam taken down from our front porch and repurposed to surveil our living room and kitchen. He could see us, but we couldn't see him.

The hospital Wi-fi was shoddy, unreliable. According to my grandmother, who stayed with him until his final days, we looked like stop-motion puppets jolting our way through a surrealistic world. But we were indeed living in such a world then. Federal lockdown orders were in place: schools were closed in strict favor of virtual classes, malls shut down and shop windows barred, parks fenced off as newly designated locations of untouchability. None of it felt entirely real. At any moment, it seemed, someone would shake me awake, and I would find that everything till now had been an illusion, a bitter corner of imagination, a long, hard dream.

So when I say my grandfather's passing was very strange, I mean: I don't remember how it all happened; I don't want to remember how it all happened. It's as if he hadn't died at all. His heart still beats with fervor; his eyes still crinkle, fishtail-like, at the edges; his tall figure still sprawls lazily on the raised tatami where he often slept on hot summer nights with the electric fan whirring at his feet. He is drawing the bow of the erhu back and forth and up and down, fluid as a ribbon dancer, spontaneous as a bird on a telephone wire. I don't mourn him. I don't miss him the way my family does. He's still here, still somewhere, just thousands of miles away, and we simply haven't found the time for a call, a message, a casual chat in far too long.

Here I sometimes stop and think a bit. I had already convinced myself that he wasn't gone, only temporarily misplaced like in Mary Poppins's "The Place Where Lost Things Go," because to me he had always been waiting at the other end of a call, there and not. Was I being heartless? Was I in denial? No, I can almost hear my dad quip, that's a river in Egypt. Perhaps I was reluctant to admit that my grandfather's life came too late into mine and his death too early. It was 2021, and his last day here was the first day of my thirteenth winter.

Nearly three and a half years have passed since then. When I open a photo album and see him smiling his downturned smile up at me, the grief doesn't come, nor the sorrow. I can't remember him as anything other than the beautiful being who plays the erhu and loves saltine crackers. He once raised my mom, my estranged uncle, and later, me. So when I think of that last month before the winter equinox, I wonder—what happened to him? What happened to us? What were we mourning, what were we crying for? Everything was strange, terribly strange.

Gone or not, he does not belong between the leaves of this album, and he does not belong solely in memories of past joy. Nor does he belong on the dedication page of some lifelong aspiration—it is not who he is. If he must belong somewhere, I think, then let it be in the mellow apartment high above the raucous streets of Wuhan, where clothes and towels hang to dry on the balcony, a computer collects dust in the hollow corner of the tatami, the water dispenser is forever running out of water—and he is sitting in the chair by the window with his erhu balanced on one knee and me on my wooden stool across from him, and he is laughing, and we are all laughing, and we are happy.